Bringing Open Source Online

The rapid adoption of software as a service creates a huge opportunity for open source software, and utility computing can be a tremendous enabler for this market shift. Online users are willing to pay for service, whether the code is open source or proprietary. A growing set of companies is addressing this market for hosted applications like Asterisk, SugarCRM, vtiger, Drupal and Zimbra. Users pay for not having to install and manage applications, for ensuring updates are installed, and for having applications available 24x7. And, of course, they also pay for support. To profitably address this need, though, requires scaling the service. Tackle that challenge, and for the first time open source developers can make money on Internet scale.

The challenge is scaling

Delivering an application online has typically required five key ingredients:

• A team that supports users, provides bug fixes and builds new features
• IT infrastructure and systems (billing, ticketing) for delivering the app
• A sales and marketing team that signs up customers
• Ability to offer a low entry price per user
• Ability to provide improved performance to high-end customers

A typical open source team has a popular application and ability to support users, fix bugs and develop new features, but may not have competence in IT operations, sales and marketing. However, thousands of hosting providers have the required IT infrastructure and systems, and are looking for value-added applications to offer. Their salespeople know how to market and sell popular applications. What hosting providers lack is ability to support those applications.

While this looks like a match made in heaven, there is a problem. Most open source applications are not multi-tenant, meaning each user has a separate copy of the application that must be provisioned and managed individually. This can hinder hosting providers from offering a low entry price. Many applications also don't scale beyond a single server, which makes it difficult to attract business customers.

Utility computing scales existing open source applications

AppLogic makes it easy to package existing open source applications and run them on grids. This removes the need to make the application multi-tenant and enables hosting providers to price it on a pay-as-you-go basis. Hosting providers can fully automate the deployment thousands of instances an application and AppLogic will actually maintain them. Plus, each instance can be scaled from a fraction of a CPU to dozens with a single command, enabling upselling of customers as their needs grow.

3Tera is partnering with open source teams to package their applications and distribute them with AppLogic to hosting providers. The partnership assures hosting providers that the team stands behind the application and will support it. Hosting providers who decide to market the application work with the team for support.

Opportunity to build a scalable open source business

AppLogic makes getting these applications online easy for both the development team and hosting providers. For the team, this expands the available market 20x by reaching the 95% of potential users who don't have the skills to set up applications. Ultimately, this means the ability to generate incremental, ongoing revenue from every user of the application.